Trump supporters at a thank you rally in Alabama last month.
Photograph: Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images

Before we finally let go of 2016, it’s worth reflecting on what we learned from it. For me, the most striking lesson was the way it demonstrated how the internet has changed democratic politics. While there is no single, overarching explanation for Donald Trump’s election, his ascendancy would have been unthinkable in a pre-internet age, for two reasons.

The first is that much of Trump’s campaign rhetoric would never have got past the editorial “gatekeepers” of an earlier era – the TV network owners and controllers, the editors of powerful print media and the Federal Communications Commission with its “fairness doctrine” (which required holders of broadcast licences to “present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission’s view, honest, equitable and balanced”).

The second reason is that in the pre-internet era, the multitudes of Trump’s vigorous, engaged and angry supporters would have had little option but to fume impotently in whatever local arenas they inhabited. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, for them to hook up with millions of like-minded souls to crowdsource their indignation and their enthusiasm for the candidate.

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So I think we can say that while the net may not have been a sufficient condition for Trump’s victory, it was definitely a necessary one. Most commentators, hypnotised by Trump’s mastery of Twitter and the prevalence of “fake news” on Facebook, attributed this entirely to social media. But again, this was an overly simplistic view, for it turns out that there was a deep structure underpinning most of what went on in social media and it needed some fairly intensive network analysis to reveal it.

Much of the heavy lifting in this regard was done by Jonathan Albright, an academic at Elon University, a private liberal arts college in North Carolina, who, in a series of remarkable blog posts, explored the vast ecosystem of far-right websites that have been proliferating on the web for years. Professor Albright’s central idea is that journalistic analysis of social media activity (for example, plotting millions of Facebook reactions to a fake news story or hashtag-surfing social media) doesn’t get us very far. What we need to understand is the online infrastructure that feeds the frenzy and that is what he set out to map.

Insurgents intuitively understand the power of simple messages, and are less scrupulous about the stories they tell

What emerges from his work is a fascinating picture of what is effectively a rightwing propaganda machine built from more than 300 fake news sites and containing something like 1.3m hyperlink connections. Albright also mapped the hidden online trackers hosted by these sites. This is similar to the tracking ecosystem behind most commercial websites. But in the rightwing case, these trackers are coming away with information not about consumption preferences but about the possible political or ideological predilections of site visitors.

One’s first reaction to Professor Albright’s maps, after the sharp intake of breath at the scale and intensity of the online activity implied by them, is to ask what would the comparable leftwing ecosystem be like? His tentative answer is that it appears to be significantly smaller and much less interconnected than the “alt-right” ecosystem.

Which is where the really interesting questions begin. Why is the political extreme right so established and dominant on the net? The answer is probably that its members have been effectively excluded from mainstream political discourse for a long time. So the internet, with its intrinsic permissiveness, was, for them, the only available option. (Indeed, it still is.) And they went for it.

Why have they been such effective exploiters of the technology? Among the possible reasons are: the fact that radicals and insurgents intuitively understand the power of simple messages; they are motivated and driven, are less scrupulous about the stories they tell and good at making the facts fit the narrative rather than the other way round. They understand propaganda, in other words.

But their main advantage may be that they have understood the affordances of cyberspace better than most of their liberal opponents, in particular the way in which its undermining of traditional institutions has opened up a world in which people find it easy to discover information that supports rather than challenges their beliefs. In that sense, the far right may have taken on board Hannah Arendt’s observation about the ideal target for totalitarian propaganda being “people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists”.